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What is the best way to partition a SSD for dual boot?
This is my first time here so if I need to elaborate on anything or provide more information I'll be happy to. I'm trying to set up a dual boot environment on my Toshiba Satellite laptop. I've done this one other systems in the past enough to where it had become pretty routine. Trying to accomplish that this time has me at a complete loss of how to proceed.
This is my current system:
Windows 10 Home
Intel Core i3-3217U
PNY 480Gb SSD (this was swapped in as the original HDD was going bad)
I went about how I had done in the past and went into Computer Management > Disk Management to partition off a significant amount of free space for the second OS.
Seeing only ~38Gb available when the drive has ~267Gb of free space sent me searching the internet to find out where the extra space was going.
This lead to several sources that suggested where Windows was storing pagefile.sys was the issue that kept the full amount of free space from being available during volume shrinking. Several sources again suggested that turning off virtual memory, removing restore points, and deleting pagefile.sys would free up this space. It turned out not freeing up the space. So I reverted those changes.
I thought well maybe I could backup the drive and use Windows restoration feature to force it to reformat to the size I'd like (while retaining enough space to fit the data). I backed up and made a system image using "Backup and Restore (Windows 7)". I then used Microsoft's media creation tool to create a bootable USB so that I could enter repair mode and force the drive to be reformatted in the way that I'd like to achieve. After entering the repair mode both my backup and system image were detected but the SSD wasn't. (Several linux installers can't see it and neither does gparted)
After this I'm really at a loss for how to proceed to get the SSD in the state that I'd like.
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